Thursday, August 30, 2007

Puter Tilt

I actually made it to the Monkey this past Tuesday night. Due to projects at work I had not been making it out there much this month, so it was going to be nice to be back.

About 15 min before game time I powered up the PC. It pretty much insta-freezes during the Windows load forcing me to do a hard reboot. That should have been my first clue. When it came back up, it took about ten minutes to load everything before I could fire up Stars. That was clue number two. It seemed as if Stars was taking about a month to load as well, then I noticed that my virus scanner was running and using up about 270% of the puters resources, so I shut it down. Once Stars finished loading, I noticed that the virus scanner had frozen in the background while it was shutting down. Clue number three.

With about two minutes to spare, I managed to get myself signed up for the Monkey. Moments later the table pops up, I can hear the whir of cards being dealt, but oddly enough I can see no cards. I hear blinds being posted, bets being made, and my table is still 100% card free. I hear the beep that lets me know that it’s my turn to act and then about five seconds later my screen refreshes and I can see my cards and the action to date. I fold the junk I was give and sit back. My cards are still on the screen in front of me, I hear the buzz of “You have 15 seconds to act.” Finally my hand gets folded. Rinse, wash, repeat. Three times. I figure people must be getting annoyed with me in much the same way that I am getting annoyed with ye old PC. I contemplate reprogramming it with a hammer when I notice that the screen hasn’t changed for a bit. Then the “Network Connection Lost” box pops up as it tries to reconnect. Until the PC freezes again and I get to reboot again.

The puter must be getting warmed up now, cause it only took eight minutes to go from reset to logging back into Stars. Only to see my AQo in mid/late position insta-mucked for me. Obviously the PC felt bad for that so it tried to make it all better by spontaneously rebooting for me.

I take a deep breath, get it all back up and running and see a perty AKs when I get back. I attempt to make 4BB raise, but now have that annoying system lag again. I try to enter the bet again and when something finally goes thru, I had somehow managed to put in all but 30 of my chips. I don’t recall who it was (possibly Smokey) but someone called me. Two more hearts on the flop, I got put all-in for my last 30 chips as my opponent flopped a set, but no more hearts for me and the board paired so my busted flush went down to a boat. I said my gg’s and gl’s and then ripped the power cord out of the socked to give the PC the shutdown it had earned.

This weekend—say it with me—Format the HDD’s and reinstall!! Thank the gods that it’s a long weekend!

If you actually made it this far, go check out the Bloglines Beta! They have been long overdue for an update and my-oh-my is it sweet!